It was a pleasure to be featured on Ron Placone’s “Get Your News on with Ron.” We discussed fascism, anti-communism in the media and academia, labor struggles, organizing, general strikes, and the ultimate systemic disease: capitalism.
“Foucault, Anti-Communism & the Global Theory Industry” was just published in “The Philosophical Salon” in the Los Angeles Review of Books. It is a reply to critics regarding my earlier article, on the same platform, entitled “Foucault: The Faux Radical.”
Excerpt: “The widespread promotion of identity politics and French theory within the dominant apparatus of knowledge under global capitalism should serve as a clear indication to anyone who’s paying even scant attention that they are not a threat to the system. On the contrary, they are some of the primary intellectual forces driving what I’ve referred to as radical recuperation. By this I mean the tactic of producing the appearance of radicality—including symbolic systems of signification that are so inordinately intricate that many have trouble seeing how unmoored they are from actual socioeconomic struggles—in order to better recuperate insurgent forces within the extant system. ‘All symbol, no substance’ is their mantra, and they have made an enormous contribution to the intellectual world war against the very idea of communism.”
Chris Hedges me entrevistó para su programa de televisión “On Contact,” y la transcripción ha sido traducida al español: “La clase capitalista estadounidense financió el ascenso del fascismo.”
Me siento honrado de que uno de mis artículos recientes, “El poli bueno y el poli malo del capitalismo,” se haya traducido al español para Rebelión. Haga clic aquí para leerlo. Extracto: “El análisis materialista demuestra que liberalismo y fascismo, al contrario de lo que mantiene la ideología dominante, no son opuestos; son socios dentro del sistema capitalista criminal.” Haga clic aquí para leer más.
Here is my opening lecture from the Critical Theory Workshop‘s online summer program 2020. Click here for the call for applications for the 2021 summer program, which will take place online and–hopefully–in person.
Me siento muy honrado de que uno de mis artículos recientes sobre el fascismo se haya traducido al español para Rebelión. Haga clic aquí para leerlo. Extracto: “El concepto burgués de fascismo pretende singularizarlo como un fenómeno idiosincrático, en gran parte o completamente superestructural, con el fin de imposibilitar cualquier examen de su ubicua presencia en la historia del orden capitalista mundial. Por el contrario, el enfoque materialista histórico propone un análisis a múltiples escalas de la totalidad social con el fin de demostrar que es más adecuado entender la coyuntura específica del fascismo europeo de entreguerras como un fenómeno enmarcado dentro de una fase estructural de la guerra de clases capitalista y, en último término, de la historia sistémica del capital, que vino al mundo –en palabras usadas por Karl Marx para describir la acumulación primitiva– “exudando sangre y mugre por todos los poros, de la cabeza a los pies”.” Haga clic aquí para leer más.
I was very honored and pleased to participate in this dialogue with Diana Wechsler and Leandro Martínez Depietri for BIENALSUR 2021. One of the central points of discussion is the role of culture in class struggle. Drawing on the work I’ve been doing with Jennifer Ponce de León for our current book project, I distinguished between the aesthetics of power–meaning the diverse ways in which the power elite creates an image of itself, and how this image serves its class interests–and the power of aesthetics to both diagnose the various uses of culture as a weapon for the ruling class and channel an alternative world of sense making. All Power to the Creative Labor Power of the People!
“El imaginario dominante dentro de la coyuntura neoliberal es reductivista, determinista, teleológico y trata de convencernos de que la historia es inevitable y que lo único que podemos hacer es seguir las consecuencias… La contra-historia es un intento de transformar metodológicamente nuestras herramientas de comprensión histórica para tener una aprehensión diferente del orden mundial contemporáneo”, dice el filósofo, crítico cultural y activista Gabriel Rockhill (FRA/USA), con quien BIENALSUR inaugura un ciclo de conversaciones íntimas, de puesta en foco de ideas y pensamientos. Rockhill estudió con algunas de las voces más sobresalientes de la filosofía francesa, incluyendo a Derrida, Irigaray, Balibar y Badiou. Es profesor de filosofía en la Universidad de Villanova y director fundador del Critical Theory Workshop y conocido por sus revolucionarios trabajos sobre historia, estética y política publicados en nueve libros y numerosos artículos, una obra cuya primera compilación en español será publicada por la Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero en 2021 a través de un número especial de la revista Estudios Curatoriales.
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“The dominant imaginary within the neoliberal conjuncture is reductivist, deterministic, teleological and tries to convince us that history is inevitable and that the only thing we can do is to follow the consequences… Counter-history is an attempt to methodologically transform our tools of historical understanding to have a different apprehension of the contemporary world order”, says philosopher, cultural critic and activist Gabriel Rockhill (FRA/USA), with whom BIENALSUR inaugurates a cycle of intimate conversations and focused debatesRockhill studied with some of the leading luminaries of French theory, including Derrida, Irigaray, Balibar and Badiou. He is Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University and Founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop being known for his revolutionary works on history, aesthetics and politics published in nine books and numerous articles, a work whose first compilation in Spanish will be published by UNTREF in 2021 through a special issue of the journal Estudios Curatoriales.
“The US was recognized by the Nazis as the best model of racial apartheid & statecraft. [In fact,] when Italian fascism first came on the international scene, there were many articles in the US press that recognized that it was the European version of the KKK.” Honored to be featured on Chris Hedges’ “On Contact” to discuss my emerging book project on a counter-history of fascism and liberalism (click here to watch).
The work under discussion is a series of four articles I’ve written:
“Fascism: Now You See It, Now You Don’t!” CounterPunch (October 12, 2020).
“Liberalism and Fascism: Partners in Crime.” CounterPunch (October 14, 2020).
“The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It.” CounterPunch (October 16, 2020). This article was translated into Spanish.
“Liberalism & Fascism: The Good Cop & Bad Cop of Capitalism.” Black Agenda Report (October 21, 2020).
Tuve el honor de tener uno de mis artículos recientes sobre el fascismo traducido al español por Robert Avecino y publicado en Rebélion (agradecimiento especial a Greg Wilpert por la recomendación): “El verdadero legado de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, lejos de ser el de un orden mundial liberal que había derrotado al fascismo, es el de una verdadera internacional fascista desarrollada bajo la cobertura liberal para intentar destruir a quienes realmente habían luchado y ganado la guerra contra el fascismo: los comunistas.”
